The long-term objective of the present proposal is to begin a program of research that will contribute to an understanding of the cognitive (and eventually neurobiological) processes that underlie the symptom picture of borderline personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe, impairing, life threatening, and relatively common form of personality disturbance (estimated prevalence is approximately 2% in the general population). Understanding the cognitive mechanisms associated with the phenomenology of this syndrome may provide clues to etiology or maintenance of the disorder. The proposed research appears to be a logical first step in achieving that goal. The research will examine various types of memory functioning in three samples of subjects with BPD, representing three levels of social and occupational dysfunction: university students, individuals from the community, and patients. The memory tasks will include the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R), a standard neuropsychological measure of memory abilities, an implicit/explicit memory task, an autobiographical memory task, and a directed forgetting task. Stimuli for each of the tasks (except for the WMS-R) will be affectively charged words presumed to be salient in this population, (e.g., abandon, reject, loss), as well as neutral, negative, and positive words. Subjects with BPD will be compared with age and education matched controls on all tasks.